Smell the jasmine

"Marhaba. Smell the jasmine and taste the olives. Jawwal welcomes you to Palestine," said the automatic text message as my phone roamed onto the Palestinian network, and the welcome has already been echoed by dozens of impoverished, abused and occupied people who have piled me with tea, food and kind words in the 24hrs I've been here. I had a marathon trip on Monday, driving from Basra to Kuwait, flying to Amman, flying to Tel Aviv and (after 3 hours of interrogation) driving to Jerusalem. Yesterday morning I came down to Khalil (Hebron) where I'll be staying for a few days.

I've just returned from a morning visiting families in Wadi al-Ruz, a beautiful fertile valley which is now surrounded on all sides by illegal Israeli settlements (Kiryat Arba, Harsina - here is the settlers' website, a scary read) and army and police posts. Palestinian cars have been bared for four years from the one remaining road into the village (and a chunk of the road has been fenced off and annexed to Kiryat Arba), meaning that the people have a half hour walk to get to the nearest shops. It gets more serious when there are medical emergencies. We visited one family which suffers daily abuses and rock throwing from the settlers across the street and the military checkpoint next to their house. The 75yr old grandfather had fallen while praying at the mosque and broken his arm and leg. He was unable to go to hospital because he can't walk and no doctors will come to him because they are afraid of the soldiers. His wife has diabetes and had just been to hospital after an attack. We met her sitting by the roadside in the blazing sun, exhausted and shaking having only walked about 20% of the distance to her home. I stopped a passing police car which luckily turned out to be driven by a Palestinian mechanic who had fixed it and was returning it to the station, and he agreed to give her a lift home. [PHOTO: The road to Wadi al-Ruz. The red-roofed buildings and everything to the right, including all the construction sites, are the settlement of Kiryat Arba. Many of the houses are empty but they are building at a frantic rate to grab more land. The concrete blocks on the road are U-shaped sniper posts, while the camo-netting of the first military checkpoint is visible. The Palestinian village is still half a mile walk away.]

We carried along on foot but were summoned in for tea and breakfast when we past the old lady's house. Her 2yr old granddaughter was terrified of me, but after about 15mins of her father reassuring her "mish Yahud" (he's not a Jew) she finally came over and greeted my shyly. How horrible that her entire life experience (the children get stoned by settlers if they step outside their front door) has taught her to quiver in fear at the sight of Jews.

Another family we drank tea with, further down the valley, told how their 15yr old daughter had stopped going to school after being searched and repeatedly groped by the soldiers at the checkpoint she has to pass every day walking to school. Their 8 yr old son had huge cauliflower ears (bent so they are perpendicular to the face, as some Rugby players develop from scrums). Two days ago the soldiers grabbed him by the ears and picked him up so his full weight was hanging from them. The same family regular gets raided at night by the military post overlooking their house, 5 days ago soldiers were banging at their door at 3am and firing off gunshots.

These stories are just a tiny sample from the lives of Palestinians in Hebron, the only city in which settlers have stolen houses in the centre of town (normally they just ring around the outside, as at Bethlehem, turning the town into a big prison), as a result life is particularly hard for the local people as they are terrorised not just by the settlers but the police and soldiers as well (who steal yet more land for their bases). Nevertheless I still get greeted in the street with a "shalom" by Palestinians who assume I'm Israeli, and receive a kings welcome when they discover I am here in solidarity with them. The hospitality of the Palestinian people is the jasmine which I can smell everywhere I go.